When stars explode at death, all the matter that built up in their outer shells gets blown out into interstellar space. Carbon, oxygen, silicon, gold, and silver were all floating around as clouds of elements in space, then gravity pulled them together to form the planets. This is how the planet Earth formed with its ninety-two natural elements, al

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thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see

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